Tariff talk really targets ignorance in people. I cannot see how I could get my Texas brother in law, who is actually smart enough, to drop his worship of Trump and hatred of Peloski long enough to figure this out or even listen to someone making the point.
All of us know that tariff is just another name for federal sales tax and that it is highly regressive. In states we know we pay some percent of spending, with known exceptions, in sales tax. This federal sales tax seems intractable to me. You know prices around you are going up but parcing out what percent is due to tariffs seems impossible.
Also, the tax introduction comes in slowly, and, at some point should level out IF the before import price remains the same. If not, you pay tax on the added price too but still don't know how much. It leveled off but, like all sales taxes, never became constant. (If import price goes down, it goes down. Works both ways but you never can actually enumerate it in your life.) I know that you know Canada's current tariff on cars is 25%, but, how do you know if the pass through embedded in the price is more than, equal to, or less than the tariff?
At any rate, it isn't itemized on your sales receipt like other sales taxes but, like all federal taxes, it goes to the government and you never saw the amount of tax you paid enumerated. For lower and middle class Americans, most income taxes didn't change to compensate and those that did weren't permanent. That is not good if the tariff, via stolen elections, never goes down.
Indeed, at some point, they might just drop the tariff language and enact the equivalent sales tax directly. In an authoritarian regime, the winners don't need to worry about the losers any more. The only thing that holds poor people's tax down is not having enough money to spend in the first place.
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